Best in show

“This installation piece by the Frankfurt-based artist Andrea Büttner is part of Hidden Marriage, an exhibition in which she brings together two of the museum’s main resources, the herbarium and the collection of drawings by Gwen John.

Throughout the duration of the show, this living moss garden grows on volcanic rock, which has been placed in coloured metal trays. The moss specimens were collected locally by our scientific curator Ray Tangney, whose influence is felt everywhere in the gallery.

As well as helping to create this piece, he’s also a keen photographer. Büttner was delighted to call on such a specialist, even selecting some of his pictures for display.

We’re very proud that he’s definitely in there as a maker in his own right. While seemingly unconnected on the surface, the work of Gwen John and a moss garden both have a resonance with Büttner‘s wider work.

One link between the two disparate collections is, surprisingly, nuns. Büttner previously produced a series of videos and pictures inspired by them, and John, of course, also created her own drawings in the closed religious communities of Paris where she lived in the 1910s and 1920s.

The two artists also share an interest – some 100 years apart – in the life of St Thérèse of Lisieux, a 19th-century Carmelite nun.

John obsessively reworked a prayer card image of her over and over again while Büttner is particularly keen on her writings, The Little Way, in which St Thérèse – known to some as ‘the little flower’ – described spirituality as being based on small gestures rather than ‘great deeds’.

The common notion of littleness is also reflected in the fact that, technically-speaking, moss is categorised as a ‘lower plant’ under the rather imprecise term cryptogam, which, perhaps rather significantly, means ‘hidden sexuality’.

Many of the 80 or so drawings and watercolours by John selected for this show are on public display for the first time alongside Büttner’s other work, which includes photography, drawing, sound and sculpture.

The key of the exhibition for us is how working with a contemporary artist can bring together parts of a collection to have a real impact and meaning for audiences.

It would be very hard for an institution like us to sit down and try to think of a way to effortlessly link Gwen John with moss specimens from a herbarium but it seems to make sense here thanks to Büttner’s intervention.

A fresh pair of eyes can produce brand new ways of thinking about museums.”

Nicholas Thornton is the head of modern and contemporary art at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales

Hidden Marriage runs until 2 June